


Port Out, Starboard Home

by scioscribe



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Dual Genitalia, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fuckbuddies To Lovers, Intersex Jotunn (Marvel), Marrying Someone Pregnant Knowing the Baby's Not Yours to Protect Them Both, Mpreg, Past Loki/Grandmaster, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Space Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:40:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25676002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Loki was, as it turned out, pretty far along, as the Jotnar reckoned pregnancies. They carried for fourteen standard months and only really started to show in the last five, and it was those five months, apparently, that Loki was in now.His Aesir body had hit a point where it was no longer equipped to carry the child, and some unconscious reflex had shifted him to a shape that was more accommodating. Apparently—magically—his two forms usually coexisted somehow, which was how he’d managed to get knocked up in the first place.“They have similar instances on Earth,” Thor said, almost absently. “Something to do with waves and particles—and they have a breed of undead cat, you know, it’s both alive and dead at the same time. It’s all very interesting, the way things coexist.” He cleared his throat. “What are you going to do?”
Relationships: Brunnhilde | Valkyrie/Loki (Marvel)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 207
Collections: Just Married Exchange 2020





	Port Out, Starboard Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



Val woke to someone knocking on her door, the sound just out of rhythm with the pounding in her head.

She struggled upright, tangling herself up in the sheets and rubbing at eyes that were apparently gummed-up and full of sawdust. She knew she was alone before she got her eyes open, though: she’d wound up with more than her fair share of the covers, and Loki would have never put up with that if he’d still been around.

It was a little strange, that empty stretch of bed. She swung her legs over it and stood up, staggering for a moment with her hand clenched tight around the bedpost. It had been a few weeks since the last time either of them had skipped out before dawn.

Another burst of hammering at the door.

“I’m coming.” She scooped her breeches up off the floor and then stopped, the weirdness of this all finally making its way through the fug of her hangover.

They weren’t in emergency mode anymore, or at least they weren’t supposed to be. They were settled. New Asgard, a suspended, starlit world of enormous hydroponic gardens and a hundred clever little vibranium gadgets, a half-finished world of peace and fresh mangoes and dull-as-dirt council meetings. If someone needed a Valkyrie at half-past the ass-crack of the morning, it wasn’t good.

A little of the muddle cleared out of her head, replaced by something colder. She covered up just enough for decency and opened the door.

It was Thor, his mouth set in a grim line that looked odd next to the sudden hopefulness that leapt into his eyes. “Is Loki with you?”

She hadn’t realized he’d known that was even a possibility. She’d certainly never planned on telling him.

“No,” she said, feeling the coldness settle down at the bottom of her stomach. She stepped aside so he could see into her quarters.

Not that there was much to see. She had the right to better housing, to a spacious suite of rooms with more than just the little closet-sized washroom that hooked onto her barely-furnished bedchamber; this whole corridor of rooms was supposed to just be for emergency overflow. Most of it wasn’t even fully constructed yet; there was vacuum two doors down. Everywhere else was fancier. But this was what she was used to, and this was what she’d kept. And there wasn’t much room for anyone to hide out, so there was no reason for Thor to peer around like he hoped Loki would come popping out from under the bed.

“Damn it all. I’d hoped—” He sighed, scrubbing at his face briefly with both hands like he needed to wake himself up. “Loki’s missing. He’s gone who knows where and Heimdall can’t find him. Loki’s always been able to cloak himself from the far-sight when it suits him—for mischief when we were children and far worse in recent years. If he’s decided to leave Asgard, to give up all we’ve built together, he’s done it without a single word to anyone, so far as I can tell. Except none of the shuttles seem to be missing.”

She knew what all he had to fear, but it felt different to her: she hadn’t seen too many of those schemes and betrayals firsthand. It was easier for her to trust that he hadn’t been on the verge of running out on them.

But the time she’d known him was a drop in the bucket of all the years Thor had lived with him, loved him, fought with him.

“Do you think he’d do that? Just go?”

“I don’t know. I’d thought that things were better now. But if he were in some kind of trouble—I don’t know that he’d ask for help.”

He wasn’t only concerned that Loki might have done a vanishing act, then; he wasn’t only hoping against disappointment. He was worried, and it didn’t suit him. He wasn’t made for it, not even now that statecraft had started the long work of etching frown-lines into his nearly-immortal, nearly-changeless face. He looked older now than he had when she’d met him—but she’d still never seen him scared. Not until now.

“You think something might have happened to him,” Val said.

“He has his enemies. It’s not like he’s always easy to get along with, you know: he does tend to rub people the wrong way, especially if he starts trying to kill them.”

Yeah. She could speak to that one from personal experience. “Bold to come straight into New Asgard to try to harm its prince. _Idiotic_ might be a better word for it. Reckless.”

“Not if it worked.” A spark played along his knuckles, violet-white lightning not quite settling down in his eyes. “That was the other time Heimdall couldn’t find him, you see. Aside from the times Loki hid himself deliberately. He was swallowed up by the Void, and he’s never spoken of what manner of creature broke his fall. Not a happy one. Making my displeasure known to whatever host that was has been somewhere on the to-do list, but, well, one thing and then another. Infinity Stones, murderous secret sister, kingdoms. You get bogged down.”

Their eyes met, and she saw that the lightning had won out there after all; it was like looking into the heart of a star. He’d been rambling. They weren’t especially good at talking, either one of them, but the things they _were_ good at would combine very nicely if someone had dared to do this. If Loki couldn’t be found—if he were harmed—

Well, they wouldn’t get bogged down. She was certain of that.

“We’ll find him,” Val said. “If it turns out this is some sort of prank, we’ll rend him limb to limb.”

Their hunt across New Asgard was mostly fruitless. They weren’t sounding a general alarm yet, so it was just the three of them—Val herself, Thor, and Heimdall—to search a space station the size of a fucking city.

Val saw more of it today than she’d seen since it was in the planning stages. Those flexible blueprints in nets of light on Princess Shuri’s drafting table had become shit she’d never seen anywhere else in the galaxy. There were corridors where the floor was covered in flowers and tall blue-green grass; there were apiaries and dairies and pottery sheds and densely-planted gardens (still mostly seedlings) watered by mist from the ceilings. She walked through glass-like tunnels, surrounded on all sides by stars and empty space. She followed the trail of a silvery brook that wound through most of the station’s common areas, and she saw the backs of brown trout flickering under the surface of the water.

Another time, she might have appreciated it. Now, she just resented its spaciousness, its wide-open vistas that could so easily have accommodated strangers.

Their new world felt as fragile as a soap bubble. Had something just burst it?

Her field of vision developed a gilt edge—Heimdall’s version of knocking. “Yeah,” she said, and an image of him materialized in front of her.

“I’m getting flashes of him,” Heimdall said. “Here and there. He hasn’t left.”

“Is he hurt?”

Heimdall hesitated. Thor worried and Heimdall uncertain—a day for too many firsts she didn’t like. “He’s—inconvenienced. Unwell, maybe. It would be hard to explain.”

“I’m fucking him almost every night and even sleeping in his bed, or him in mine, when we don’t think we’ll kill each other,” Val said bluntly. “Try.”

He evaded her, though. Hard to pressure someone who could cut the conversation off just by looking away. All he said was, “Apparently he chose my quarters as his hiding spot.” His lips twitched, just barely, like this wasn’t really the time for smiling. “He knew I’d be out searching for him. You can tell him from me that that was fairly clever; you’ll get there before I will, I’m all the way out in the sixth ward.”

“You’ve told Thor.” He must have, so she didn’t even bother making it a question.

“Yes.”

He hadn’t needed to tell her, then. He’d chosen to, but he’d done it for his own reasons and she doubted she’d get them out of him anytime soon.

“I’m on my way,” she said, and Heimdall nodded and winked out of view.

She made good time, even though making herself walk when she wanted to run gave her a jerkily rolling gait like she was fighting the ground beneath her. She had the override codes, so when she got to Heimdall’s doors, she got them open. Not that she wouldn’t have kicked them down if she’d needed to.

When they closed behind her, she looked around the rooms. Heimdall’s taste ran to warmer, darker colors and mellow lighting, as if he’d made this space to be as unlike the Observatory as possible. Most people tried to recapture what they’d lost. Heimdall, like her, knew to let it go. Only he’d done a better, healthier job of it, which was why he didn’t have a hangover right now that made him feel like his head was full of ashes and nails. There was a rancid taste in her mouth.

“I know you’re here,” she said loudly. “Whatever’s going on, you might as well tell me.”

“I disagree,” Loki said in her ear.

He deserved a thorough pricking with his own bloody daggers for that.

The warm rush of his breath against her skin was something of a relief, whether she wanted to admit it or not.

“Do you know Thor’s tearing his hair out worrying about you?”

“He can keep that up. It looks better on him short.” His voice was strained.

“Dammit, Loki—”

There was a strangled sound off to her left, and she wheeled around just in time to catch a glimpse of him.

A glimpse of someone, anyway, and she didn’t know who else it was supposed to be.

Except this someone was blue.

“I know you’re Jotun, you know,” she said. “I’ve seen the kids putting on that stupid play.”

All the blood-and-thunder dramas of her youth, all the romantic epics that ended with lovers kissing desperately while glamoured stage blood dripped from their false wounds, all the Valkyrie bedroom farces—gone, so gone they hadn’t even been heard of by Thor’s time, but Loki’s wank-off of a myth had managed to live through Asgard’s burning. No wonder there was no god or goddess of art in their little royal pantheon.

Loki didn’t answer her.

“I can wait you out. I don’t have much patience, but you’ve got even less.”

Apparently he was willing to concede on that point, because after a long moment, he came into view again.

Never mind being Jotun, blue-skinned and red-eyed and lined with heritage marks—he looked like Helheim itself. His hair was damp with sweat and a twitch seemed to have taken up residence near his left eye. His lower lip was bleeding, like he’d bitten it while he was concentrating.

“Well?” he said sharply.

Val shrugged. “Is that why you went to ground? You changed and couldn’t change back?”

He just barely nodded, like he wasn’t going to do anything more with this body than he had to. “People can’t see me like this.”

“It’s not like it’s a secret.”

“There’s a difference between an Aesir child in a play, daubed with blue paint, and a _Frost Giant_ striding around New Asgard in a prince’s raiment. One is adorable. The other is a threat.”

“Well, you’re not adorable,” Val said, “so that makes you the threat, then, yeah?”

He glared at her, and she looked back coolly, letting him take in that she wasn’t averting her eyes or recoiling in horror or fainting or fainting like an unblooded babe or whatever it was he thought people would do if they saw him. He wasn’t unpleasant to look at.

“You don’t understand. We’ve warred with Jotunheim since your time.”

She snorted. “I’ve fought on Jotunheim. I watched my own blood freeze on an ice-dagger as one of their warriors pulled the blade from my stomach. You can’t name a world we didn’t war with. None of those quarrels were special.”

She could count on one hand the number of battles she’d been in that had actually _achieved_ something: most of them had been nothing but royal arm wrestling. She’d been so fucking young then, drunk on mead and death and glory and cock and cunt, feeling like Valhalla was as close as the pounding of blood in her ears. Jotunheim had been a good time for her, or so it had seemed back then. She liked that ice-dagger scar so much she’d kept it as a souvenir. What was wrong with seeing a Jotun where you already knew one was anyhow? She could get why Loki wanted his usual shape back, sure, but who else could give a damn about it? The Jotuns had been good, honorable foes.

“Thor and I were raised on stories of how glorious it is to slay Frost Giants,” Loki said, his tone clipped. “Because they are monstrous. And I haven’t been especially good proof that those stories were lies, have I?”

Val could never keep track of all the wrongs Loki had apparently done. “All right.”

“I don’t like this form, and I won’t be seen in it. That’s all there is to it. And when I find out what impertinent magic has stuck me with it—"

Thor strode in, and Loki’s image blew out like a candle.

“Stop doing that.” Val kicked where she thought she’d left him, but there was no satisfying sound of contact.

“This isn’t one of your better stunts, brother,” Thor said to the empty air. He was trying to be light, Val could tell, but he still looked a little gray-faced with worry. “Come out before I have to—devise some sort of clever strategy to make you.”

“And that isn’t one of your better threats,” Loki said.

A tiny bit of the tension in Thor’s shoulders eased. “What’s happened? What’s wrong with you?”

Loki sighed audibly and then, so slowly it was like he was easing into too-hot water, he filled in the outline of himself.

“Oh,” Thor said.

Loki repeated it mockingly: “ _Oh_?”

“I never got much of a chance to look at you like this.” Val had never thought before of caution being one of Thor’s virtues, but he was being cautious now, cautious and soft, like he was handling something so fragile it could break if he so much as twitched his finger wrong. “The blue clashes with the green a little, you know, but you probably weren’t thinking of that when you chose your colors. Of course black goes with everything.”

“I’m so happy to have your opinions on fashion.”

“Right, as you should be.” Thor cleared his throat. “You don’t have to hide away because of this.”

“I’m not _hiding_. I’m—looking into a problem. In seclusion.”

“In Heimdall’s quarters, where you’ve been coincidentally invisible.”

“Well, you just don’t understand the process.”

“He’s stuck,” Val said. “Like when you reach down into a jar and then you can’t get your hand out.”

“Does that happen to you a lot?” Thor said, his face deliberately bland. “Because, you know, Loki has surprisingly delicate hands, he can always reach into something for you if you need it done.”

“Would the two of you—”

“You must have wanted us to find you,” Val said, meaning _so you might as well just talk to us_. “You let your cover slip, and you knew Heimdall would have an eye out for you.”

Loki’s lips looked suddenly thin, and his teeth lined up with the blue-black scabbing Val had already noticed, like he wanted to open the cut back up again. He seemed to be weighing his options, and apparently they were all coming up slighter than he’d like. He said, “I didn’t let it slip on purpose. My magic has been … unreliable since I found myself like this. It cost me a ludicrous amount of effort to veil myself at all, and to sustain the illusion is—tiring.”

Val remembered that ice-dagger again. It had grown straight out of her opponent’s hand, a sudden spike from her knuckles. Jotuns had their own magic, and maybe Aesir charms wouldn’t flow perfectly—at least not straight off—through a body that wasn’t used to them. But she was guessing Loki had already come to that conclusion on his own.

They’d get him sorted, she was going to say, and then Heimdall joined them. Loki didn’t even try the veiling trick this time.

Heimdall only said, “You could have helped yourself to a drink. I wouldn’t be surprised if you needed one.”

Val did, certainly. She’d never needed a hair of the dog so badly in her life. She didn’t like any of this.

Loki said, very quietly, “Can you see beneath the skin? If you look deeply?”

“Skin can be made transparent like anything else. I can’t say for sure I’d know what I was seeing—I’ve never made a habit of it.”

“Too many skeletons walking around,” Val said.

“You should talk to a healer,” Heimdall said, still looking at Loki. “I don’t have the knowledge.”

“I’d prefer you,” Loki said. He added hastily, “I don’t see the point in walking all the way to the healing bay unless I know I need to.”

“To save you the inconvenience, then.” He began studying Loki, and then he blinked. “Ah.”

“‘Ah’ what?” Thor’s demand came with a distant crackle of thunder. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s not dying, to spare you that worry.” To Loki, he said, “I think it would be best if I spoke to you alone.”

“Why bother?” Loki said bitterly. “It seems I can’t conceal anything else. Just say it, whatever it is.”

Again—and more clearly now, and for far longer—she saw that Heimdall was unsure. Then he said, “You’re with child.”

* * *

With child—and, as it turned out, pretty far along, as the Jotnar reckoned pregnancies. They carried for fourteen standard months and only really started to show in the last five, and it was those five months, apparently, that Loki was in now.

His Aesir body had hit a point where it was no longer equipped to carry the child, and some unconscious reflex had shifted him to a shape that was more accommodating. Apparently—magically—his two forms usually coexisted somehow, which was how he’d managed to get knocked up in the first place.

“They have similar instances on Earth,” Thor said, almost absently. “Something to do with waves and particles—and they have a breed of undead cat, you know, it’s both alive and dead at the same time. It’s all very interesting, the way things coexist.” He cleared his throat. “What are you going to do?”

The healer had been plain about Loki’s options, such as they were. At this stage of the pregnancy, his Aesir form could not come to the fore. After the birth, if he carried the child full-term, his body would prove more cooperative. He’d look fully Aesir again, and all his magic would be back under his control. If he ended the pregnancy now, all that would happen pretty much immediately, give or take a day or so for the hormones to rebalance themselves.

Given all that, Val hadn’t let herself think about the child. There wouldn’t be one, surely. Loki hadn’t wanted to put up with this body for an hour, let alone five more months.

Probably it was just the hangover, but everything around her felt glassy somehow. Far away.

The would-be child was healthy now, apparently. Thriving, even.

The healer had placed the conception nine months back, well before she and Loki had ever shared a bed. Nine months back was Sakaar. The Grandmaster.

“Loki?” Thor said.

“I don’t know,” Loki said. “Shockingly, your undead cat comparison failed to illuminate anything for me.”

That glassy feeling cracked a little. Val looked up. “You don’t know?” She tried to keep the incredulity out of her voice: he had to know who’d gotten a child on him.

“I can feel it, now that I know it’s there. A sense that something’s—kindled.” He looked away. “And it’s mine. It’s part of Asgard.” He said the last bit like he was challenging anyone to object to it.

“Second in line for the throne, even,” Heimdall said mildly. “It’s already a star in our firmament, in its way.”

“You aren’t responsible, you know,” Loki said to Val. “Given the timeline.”

“Yeah. I did the math.” She supposed she would have been, if it had been a little later: they’d never talked about it, but she knew she was his only lover.

He nodded, the gesture crisp. “Well,” he said, “if I’m keeping it, which is madness, I’m not staying here for my—confinement.”

“ _Are_ you keeping it?” Thor said hopefully. “I’d make a very good uncle. I took care of you sometimes when you were little, you know. You just don’t remember.”

“ _I_ remember,” Heimdall said. “Your parents left the two of you alone for an hour, you dared Loki to climb on top of the palace roof, and in the end I had to help you both down.”

“There were probably other times that went better than that.”

“I need time to think,” Loki said. He touched his stomach, his fingers spreading out, and Val wondered if he could feel anything there yet. He kept his hand there a long time, if he couldn’t.

Maybe, she thought. Maybe there’d be a way to make it work.

* * *

Late that night, they lay in bed together, and Val risked laying her palm flat against his belly.

His Jotun body wasn’t identical to his Aesir one. He had the faint scars he’d picked up over the centuries, but they were cast in shades of silver and purple now. The texture of his skin was subtly different: sleeker, firmer. And then, of course, there was what was between his legs, what she touched as she drew her hand down into the cradle of his hips. She hadn’t known for sure how tense he was—how much that rigidity was _him_ and not just his new body—until he flinched then. So he’d been holding himself still that whole time, faking—not even nonchalance, not really. Faking that he could tolerate this when he couldn’t, at least until she’d started to get to his cock and the cunt just behind it.

“Sorry,” she said abruptly, pulling up and rolling off to the side. She didn’t know what else to say.

“It’s just different.” His voice was curt. “You wouldn’t like it either, if it were happening to you.”

She felt like she should offer him something. “It did once. Not the Jotun part, obviously, but the other bit.”

He turned to face her, propping himself up on his elbow. The red in his eyes reflected less light than usual, making it harder to read his expression. “I don’t suppose you kept it.”

“No. None of us did, usually. Hard to fight when you’re sore-footed and swollen up like a barrel.”

“You paint such a splendid picture.”

  
“But that was a long time ago,” Val said. It would be different, she wanted to say, with Loki carrying the babe; she wouldn’t be compromised by _this_ child. For whatever that was worth. She reached out again, half-prepared for him to knock her hand away.

He didn’t, though. He let her settle her fingers around his navel. She could feel him breathing, and that had whatever steady reassurance she’d hoped to get from the child stirring.

“You want this,” Loki said. “You’re not exactly subtle.”

“I wasn’t exactly trying to be.” She wasn’t exactly trying to be smart, either, apparently. “You can still do what you like, not that you ever need to be told that.”

A small chuff of laughter. “No.”

She’d dealt out a lot of deaths in her life, and she’d seen scores, hundreds, thousands more than that: enemies and Valkyries and innocents. To be part of some new life after all that—that would be something, wouldn’t it? But she didn’t know that she wanted this for any other reason than that it had come on its own, for any other reason than that she felt a kind of warm, nervy terror thinking about it. Loki’s child—and her still able to swing a sword if need be. It had woken up parts of her that had been asleep for thousands of years. And that scared the shit out of her, but she didn’t think it would make her run.

“I’m not staying here.” It was what he’d said before. He wasn’t going to hang around New Asgard being blue and getting bigger by the day. Val got it, a bit, but she still thought he was harping on it too much.

She humored him, though. “You wouldn’t have to. It’s a big universe. Travel around. There are plenty of places that wouldn’t know a Frost Giant—or an Asgardian prince—from Sleipnir’s asshole. I’m not always sure I do either.”

“If I left,” Loki said quietly, “I might come back emptyhanded. Family is, after all, not my strong suit. And given the other party involved … I’m not promising anything.”

He wasn’t staying and he wasn’t promising. Well, she wasn’t asking, either. This was just a hope, and she’d lost enough of those over the years to be used to it.

There might be something she could offer, though. But she’d save that for later. For now—

“Do you want to fuck or not?” Val said.

She felt his breath hitch in: another half-stifled laugh. “Not. Not like this.”

 _You’ll have to get used to it sooner or later_ , she almost said, but that wasn’t true, was it? It all depended.

She slid out of bed and dressed—they never just _slept_. This wasn’t that much of a romance. They were friends, she guessed, but they weren’t even always that friendly. But he was carrying a madman’s heir, and he was short his magic. He needed someone, and she was already there. And since she’d already claimed some investment in his bloody pregnancy, she owed him something.

She had her vest up over her shoulders, the leather warm against her sides. She said, “I could stay.”

“Your quarters are depressing,” Loki said, like he was agreeing with her. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to go back to them.”

Val rolled her eyes, but she came back to bed.

* * *

Loki put up with two more days in New Asgard, and that was it.

“I don’t belong here like this,” he said.

“You belong in Asgard by virtue of being Asgardian,” Thor said shortly, “whatever you look like at the moment, and you’re the crown prince and my brother. You can’t not belong in your own home.”

“Oh, can’t I. If you’d placed that wager earlier, brother, you’d have lost it rather spectacularly.”

“We’re not talking about earlier. We’re talking about now, and how you, pregnant with your first child—”

  
“First and _only_.”

“—and with no idea what to expect from it, want to go off on your own, putting yourself at risk, when I’ve only just gotten you—when we’ve only just settled down again. Haven’t you had enough space travel for a little while?”

“Believe me, I have. But I refuse to stay here and be some sort of curiosity—the pregnant Jotun prince of Asgard. Also, need I remind you, you have no say in this.” He met Thor’s eyes—and two days in, Val noticed, he could at least do that without making it into some kind of challenge that dared you to look away. When he was with them, he forgot, a little, about those blood-flame eyes. He said quietly, “I’ll come back, whatever happens. I swear that to you.”

It had enough of an honest ring to it to make Val wonder how much he’d lied around that truth.

A tiny bit of weight seemed to shift off Thor. “Would you take a bodyguard?”

Loki smiled sweetly. “Do I need to stab you again to prove that I am deadly in my own right?”

“You’re also due to start showing any day now,” Val said bluntly. “I told you why the Valkyries didn’t usually bear children. If you keep it, you’ll get to waddling sooner or later. It’ll slow you down, make you vulnerable. And you’ll attract attention you can’t afford.”

“I can afford a great deal.”

“Not from the Grandmaster. He had his claws sheathed when the two of you played together. Maybe you think you know what he’s capable of, but you don’t have the first fucking clue.”

“Wait,” Thor said. “The Grandmaster?”

Loki shrugged. He looked largely unrepentant. “He ruled a planet. Not an especially desirable one, granted, but it could have been improved. And he was an _exceptionally_ creative lover.”

“I’ll never understand your taste in bedmates. Ah, present company excluded, obviously.”

“Glad to know your majesty approves,” Val said.

“So the Grandmaster will be looking for you if he finds out about the child,” Thor said. “Yes, that’s not good. But at least there’s no reason to believe he _would_ find out.”

“He’ll sense it,” Val said. “Take it from me. And he’s never had a kid before. He’ll see it as a fun new toy, and he’ll want to get his hands on it.”

“And he can’t be too happy with us.”

“Probably not. Sakaar was a pretty bauble for him, and we wound up taking it away. But he’s not the kind of man to go out of his way just for a grudge—as far as lunatic dictators go, he was always one of the more agreeable ones. He likes a good time better than he likes revenge. But the kid—an heir—he might want to play parent, and he’s not the sort to work out an agreement. He’d just take it.”

“I’ve no intention of allowing that,” Loki said.

“Then you need protection, especially if you’re going to step off New Asgard. You’ll need a _lot_ of protection.” She exhaled. She’d done more appallingly stupid things in her life than this. “Smartest course, maybe, would be you marry me.”

Loki stared. “Why in the Nine Reams would— _ow_.” Thor had stepped on his toe.

“It’s a generous offer,” Thor said.

“No, it’s not,” Val said honestly. “It’s shit. But it kills two birds with one stone. If I go with him, then he’s got my sword at his disposal, then anyone who tries to take him, or take the babe, I’ll just cut in two. And if we’re bound to each other, it makes it plain I have a claim on him. If we wind up in a snarl we can’t fight our way out of, it gives us a little more leverage. And it muddies the water about the child. If you didn’t look closely, you’d just see a family.” The last word was bitter, and it twisted her tongue. “Besides, I held the Grandmaster’s favor for centuries. It could soften him up, if he knew I had some part in all this.”

The trouble was that it couldn’t be temporary. Royals didn’t dissolve their marriages, not on Asgard.

A liaison was personal, but the prince’s marriage was the business of the state. It came with ceremony and public attention and all kinds of expectations.

Last night, she’d only planned on offering Loki her company. Her protection—the full protection of her name and oath—was costlier. But he had need of it, and the child had need of it, and apparently she hadn’t quite drowned her sense of chivalry.

She’d made him a solid offer that wouldn’t disgrace him. There’d been stranger unions than a prince and a Valkyrie. They got along. Sometimes.

If she was asking for his hand, she might as well tell him she knew what she was getting into.

“I know we couldn’t undo it,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I like you all right, though.”

Loki studied her. “If I accepted, and then decided not to carry the child to term …” But he trailed off, a violet flush creeping across his face. He sighed. “But I suppose that’s irrelevant. I intend to have it.”

Thor broke into one of the widest grins Val had ever seen, one that shaved a century off him at least, and he swept Loki into a hug.

“Much joy may it bring you, brother.”

“I doubt that _very_ much,” Loki said, but he’d buried his fingers deep in Thor’s cape, holding onto him tightly. “Unlimited trouble seems more likely. All that being said—” He separated himself and turned his full attention to Valkyrie. “I’d rather not have it born a bastard. Not obviously, anyway.”

It took her a moment to realize that was all the formal acceptance he was planning to offer. “Right. Let’s have a wedding, then.”

It would have taken a month to plan it properly, and Loki said repeatedly—his voice more on edge each time—that he wouldn’t wait nearly that long. In the end, they had something cobbled up after a week’s worth of engagement.

There were flowers imported from Earth: trumpet-shaped white blooms, woolly-looking red and flower flowers curled into tight coral-like branches, sweet-smelling roses (red and pink, jarring after the pearl and silver ones of Asgard). The hall smelled dizzily of summer and almond cake. She wore her Valkyrie armor, the gold plating freshly polished.

Thor had scrounged up a crown for Loki, somehow, even though she could have sworn all that stuff had burned with Asgard. It rested lightly on him, a fine crystal circlet that looked well against his dark hair.

They traded the traditional vow of Old Asgard—but not the still-older Asgard Valkyrie had known. If she’d wed him in her youth, they would have given each other honey and mead and freshly-charred meat. She would have painted his face with the marks of the Valkyrie and promised him her sword. But those had been times of war and conquest, and she supposed it made sense that their traditions had changed over the thousands of years she’d been gone.

“I give you my hand and my heart,” she said.

Just words. He said them back to her, a little more easily, a little more convincingly: so there was that famed silver tongue.

“I give you my hand and my heart.”

She pressed her mouth against his and her hand against his belly. There, that was more the kind of vow she was comfortable with.

Whatever consummation they were due would happen on the ship, not in their floating city. They were pressed for time, apparently, spurred on by whatever clock was ticking towards Loki tearing his skin off if someone’s gaze lingered on him just a little too long.

He was down the length of the banquet table, talking to Thor. About what, Val didn’t know, but he had a strange openness in his face.

Heimdall followed her gaze. “I haven’t seen him look that way in years. It suits him.”

“They say pregnancy gives you a glow.”

“They say the same thing about weddings,” Heimdall said, and he didn’t say it like it was a joke. He poured her a glass of fizzy Midgardian wine. “I’ll do my best to warn the both of you of any surprises.”

“Thanks.” She was strangely touched by that. She’d been thinking of the two of them being out there on their own. “Guess with you there’s no such thing as ‘out of sight, out of mind.’”

“I’m humble enough to remind you that I can’t look upon everything. But I can tend to what I care for, like anyone else.” He had the warmest smile she’d ever seen. “This suits you too, for what it’s worth.”

* * *

Thor was the last to bid them goodbye. He wrapped Val in a bear hug, and she grabbed him back hard enough to make his bones creak.

Then he turned to Loki.

“Heimdall will hear if you call.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with his job.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do with you gone,” Thor said.

Loki offered him a slightly unsteady smile. “After all the practice you’ve had?”

“Yes, well, I’ll be surrounded by people who almost take me seriously. Think how prideful I could become if you didn’t return.”

“I’d prefer not to.” His smile turned steadier. “You’ll be well, brother. I’m sure of it.”

Thor embraced him for a moment and mumbled against Loki’s neck—it sounded to Val like he was talking through a mouthful of porridge—“You’ll let me know when the birth is imminent? I’m not missing it.”

She couldn’t hear whatever Loki said back, but it apparently satisfied Thor, who released him.

“May your course be happy and your return home swift. And have one of those images made of the babe, the kind they take while you’re still carrying it. Jane told me about them.”

“I’ve got some questions about what you used to talk about with this girlfriend of yours,” Val said. “Dead cats and babies still in the womb. Real conversation starters there.”

Loki made an undignified sound, and when Val turned to look at him, he was smiling—the same fleeting openness in his face as had been there at the wedding banquet.

“I’ll have one of your baffling internal portraits done, yes,” Loki said.

* * *

It was harder when it was just the two of them out there in space. Val waited until New Asgard had become just a dense collage of lights behind them, and then she almost said something, but all the words seemed to dry up in her mouth.

Husband and wife. Fuck.

So it took longer for her to stir herself—by the time she managed it, they’d lost New Asgard entirely. From the distance they were at now, Earth had swallowed it up, and you couldn’t tell their space station from one of the spits of land down on the planet itself.

She cleared her throat. “Did you have a first port in mind?”

“Yes,” Loki said. “Bed.”

They hadn’t fucked since he’d woken up blue, but all the same, him bringing it up now didn’t surprise her. They’d still shared a bed a couple of times, skin brushing skin when one of them resettled in the night, and all that damn simmering had to come to a boil sooner or later. Besides, no matter how dazzlingly original Loki _thought_ he was, and however little he’d admit it, he was a traditionalist the second you scratched belong the surface. And it was their wedding night.

Part of her wanted to fuck him right there in his co-pilot’s chair—spread his legs and split his Jotun cunt open with slick fingers while she swallowed down his cock. But wanting to take him to bed was a deeper ache, one that seemed to shake her bones. She stood up and, like there was a ribbon tied between them, he followed along.

She led him back to the only quarters on the ship. The whole place had been aired out recently, and it smelled like clover. All this floral shit was giving Val a headache, but she thought that she might be able to put it out of her mind if she could just ram as much of herself as possible into Loki Odinson and maybe have him return the favor. The time would come for being delicate with him, but that time wasn’t here yet. She didn’t want to go soft, not after waiting so long, not after swearing herself to him, and she didn’t think he wanted it either.

“Can I have all of you?” she said.

Loki bared his teeth at her in what she wasn’t sure counted as a smile. “All you can take, at any rate.”

Fine with her. She liked a challenge—and he could at least be a bother, which was close enough.

She shoved up against him, pinning him between her and the wall, and it was amazing how quickly he gave in to her, for all his bluster: he parted his lips for her at once, like there was nothing he wanted more than for her to take his mouth as ruthlessly as she could take the rest of him. So she did; she licked into him. He was bitter with almond cake, same as her. She could taste just enough sour panic underneath all that to pull away and tease his neck with her teeth instead, rousing a shudder from him.

Loki could be lazy in bed sometimes, but not tonight. He took as much as she gave, and then some, and he gave too, his hands pulling her hips tight against his.

“Bed,” Val said breathlessly. Not everything she wanted to do to him could be done as easily standing.

They stripped their clothes off and went, and Val decided not to give him time to turn shy. She lowered herself down and mouthed sloppily at his cock, licking and sucking and taking him in her mouth just to let him out again. Driving him to distraction in general, because Loki liked mess, liked being used, but didn’t like liking it. He liked to think of himself as some fucking connoisseur of fucking, with sublimely elevated tastes, finicky and decadent, but he wasn’t. He hadn’t needed a whit of the Grandmaster’s creativity.

He needed _her_ , and a hot flare of possessiveness went through her, sharp as a knife. She pumped his cock with one hand, half for the pleasure of it and half to get out of the way, and then she kissed his smooth, wet cunt.

Loki made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, and Val couldn’t tell what it meant. She pulled back just a little and tested the waters—well, tested them as much as she was capable, anyway, and with an eye towards making them both happy.

“You said all I can take. Did you mean it?”

His breath was sharp and sounded half-strangled, but his chin hitched up. He looked like he was about to say something, and she had some idea of what it was. Nobody had ever touched him there except maybe himself, and even then only in the last couple of days. She wouldn’t ride him as hard as she’d like. But she at least wanted to bury the taste of him so deep in her tongue that she’d dream about it.

She kissed him fiercely and then went down again, licking him open. He didn’t have a clit, just the folds and the cunt, but he seemed sensitive up above the cunt, too, or at least he moved in some pretty fucking satisfying ways when she applied her tongue there. She kept up her attentions to his cock, wanting to make it all good for him, and figuring his cock was probably all he had for a clit. Slowly, she got him wet, licking up into his body more and more until she was eating his cunt. Now she was the one liking being messy. Maybe they’d always had more in common than she wanted to believe.

Fuck, he tasted good. Almost tart. She’d missed her chance, not eating out more of the Jotnar she’d fought with.

Now it was just him. She didn’t know what that meant to her, and this didn’t feel like the time to decide. She reached between her own legs, riding her hand, abandoning his cock for a second. Loki almost hissed, like water flicked on a campfire, and Val laughed against his cunt.

“You—you—”

“Me,” Val agreed.

Another hiss. “This is practically _treason_. You’re here to protect me, not make me die of frustration.”

“A thousand apologies, your highness.” She raised up and sank down on the length of his cock, gritting her teeth just a little—she hadn’t been quite ready for it, but she liked the burn as much as he did.

Then she had an idea.

“Wait, wait.”

“I’ve waited long enough,” Loki said, but Val slid off him and he didn’t protest any further.

She turned herself around so she was facing his feet, and mounted him again that way, riding him backwards—a position that left her free to still play a little with his cunt. He’d flushed up very prettily there, and when she told him so, he came, shaking.

She was half-prepared to just get herself off after that, since she didn’t know how he’d be feeling, but he had her off the rest of the way with his fingers, his face tucked against her shoulder, breath hot on her neck. He was good at that—between getting fingered by a sorcerer or a straight-on warrior, Val would take the sorcerer every time. Good, clever fingers there—and still plenty of ruthlessness to go around. She finished easily.

“Wedded and bedded,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “Blue you’s not so bad, if you ask me. You taste better, too.”

“And our marital bliss hasn’t made you any less crass.”

He rolled over onto his side, giving her nothing but the sharp lines of his back. So now that she’d gotten done making good use of his cunt and his cock, he didn’t want her to get to look at them anymore. He lived out on the edges of his nerve endings, Loki did. She’d never understand all the things that made him flinch, and she didn’t know that she wanted to take the trouble to. It seemed like more work than it was worth, and there were times when she thought even he might agree with that.

She walked her fingers up the ladder of his spine, feeling the tension in him relax infinitesimally. “Where to next, then?” she said lightly. “Now that we’ve taken care of the consummation.”

“Anywhere civilized.” He begrudgingly turned back to her, tugging the sheet along with him so it stayed above his waist. Royal prude.

His gaze threw her, though. She’d been expecting to see any one of a dozen things—petulance, irritation, seething resentment dressed up like indifference—but what she got was something more quieter and more thoughtful. And, unbidden, she thought of Heimdall saying, _It suits him._

“The important thing,” Loki said, “was that it not be Asgard.”

Val raised her eyebrows, waiting, because it seemed like he had something more to offer than the thing he’d told her a hundred fucking times already.

“You said the Grandmaster has powers I haven’t dealt with. You seem to think them formidable, and you’re no coward. Aside from not wanting to be the sole Jotun in Asgard, I have no intention of luring anything like that home.” He spoke stiffly, like he was ready for her to laugh him off. Or doubt him.

She wasn’t going to, and she didn’t. Maybe they didn’t prattle on about honor, and maybe neither of them had done the best job of holding onto it over the years, but she wasn’t stupid: whatever else they’d done before, they’d both chosen Thor now, and the choice seemed to have stuck.

They’d chosen Asgard, too, and they had, against all odds, helped rebuild it. It didn’t surprise her at all that Loki would rather risk his own skin than draw the Grandmaster’s eye anywhere near the place; it surprised her more that he was being so fucking secretive about it.

“Why not just say all that in the first place?”

He gave her a look that suggested she’d taken a blow to the head. “You know Thor better than that. He’s been craving a good fight for months now. Defending … _this_ ,” he said, gesturing vaguely at his stomach, “would be a dream come true.”

Yeah. It’d be a dream come true for her too, for that matter. Or at least it would be once she got over the cold, brittle feeling she got thinking about it being necessary.

“Valkyrie?”

He didn’t say her name very often. He’d never really gotten over it not being much of a name at all, but that was his problem—for centuries, that name, unspoken and at the back of her mind, had been all she’d had or wanted of home.

“Just thinking,” she said.

“Regretting your proposal, no doubt.” His tone had turned acid. Really abruptly, but she’d figured out a long time ago that you couldn’t pay to much attention to his moods. They changed faster than the weather.

“Thought I’d save all my regret for a couple days in, actually.”

And then his mouth twitched, and he lost the dangerous flatness that had been in his eyes. “Why not get it out of the way early?”

“All right.” She rolled suddenly on top of him, straddling his thighs. He was quick to respond, his cock already stiffening. “Look at that. Blue you’s got better stamina, too.”

He flipped her, though he was out of his mind if he didn’t know she’d let him do it. “And more brute strength. No wonder Frost Giants were the terror of every Asgardian nursery.”

“If your wet-nurses sat around telling you fearsome tales of Jotun exercise, I’m glad I stayed well-clear for all those centuries. The shows on Sakaar weren’t much, but they were better than that.”

“You’re getting off-topic,” Loki said, like he hadn’t. “You were meant to be wondering what you’d done, vowing yourself to me.”

There was just enough false ease there for her to decide it was worth dealing with it. She skimmed one hand against his belly, wondering if it was just her imagination that she could feel some kind of curve there, a softness to his usual wiry build.

“I’m not, you know.” She was always shit at this kind of thing, and millennia without giving a damn about anyone had made it worse, left whatever courting skills she’d had rusty. “I told you before, I like you enough for it.”

 _We get along_ , she started to say, but that wasn’t always true. And that was on him, as far as she was concerned, because Norns knew she couldn’t name a single person Loki _did_ always get on with.

But it didn’t matter. He was marked on her, like he’d been inked into her skin alongside her Valkyrie tattoo. She had the feeling of just being unsurprised by his presence by now—whether they were easy with each other or uneasy, fucking or not fucking, he would just be there or it would feel wrong if he wasn’t. She was used to him in a way she couldn’t explain. And seeing him, more often than not, made her smile.

He was quiet, watching her.

“I’ve fucked around a lot,” Val said. “But I didn’t usually stick around to sleep afterwards.”

To her surprise, he smiled, and he looked like he meant it. “I may swoon. And to think that you were born in the epoch of Asgardian chivalry.”

“I wasn’t part of the damned court, was I?”

“You are now,” he pointed out. “Technically, you’re a princess.”

That word had never crossed her mind. “Fuck. I do regret marrying you after all.”

“Relax.” He kissed her breast and then rolled over, surrendering what flimsy advantage he’d had on her. “I told Thor you wouldn’t like it. Formally, you’ll only ever be Valkyrie.”

Huh. She wouldn’t have guessed he would have thought of that. It was hard to know when Loki would choose to mull on something besides himself.

Maybe she was marked on him too.

* * *

Loki didn’t care where they went, and all Val’s old stomping grounds were shitholes.

Not much camouflage on any of them for a slumming prince of Asgard. Loki liked his dissipation well enough, but not when he was with child, and anyway, his pleasures ran pricier and riskier than hers. Two minutes in a dive bar on Contraxia and he’d have insulted the wine enough to get them in a brawl that wouldn’t end until they were hip-deep in dead Ravagers, and then they’d have a feud to contend with. Couldn’t take the arsehole anywhere. Nothing sorrier than a man who prided himself on having social finesse and not fucking use it.

“I think you don’t want to set down anywhere,” Loki said one day, watching Val consider and reject destinations, her fingers flicking through lit-up star charts.

She thought he was joking at first, but if he had been, he would have put more effort into it; he was only giving her half his attention, sitting there making little ice-daggers prickle out of the back of his hand only so he could look disgusted with them. He still hadn’t gotten his illusions working consistently again.

“Why wouldn’t I want to land?”

“You’re worried about the child. For reasons beyond the Grandmaster.” He looked up at her. “What I don’t know is why.”

She could have denied it, but she didn’t. “It’s just a last chance, isn’t it? I don’t have any intention of carrying one myself.” And Loki would surely take whatever precautions were necessary to make sure he’d never be in this position again.

Which was a shame, because the thought of being the reason behind his growing belly made her muscles grow tight and cunt flutter. She liked looking at him now, but she’d like it even more if it had been her handiwork.

“You’re both safe here,” she said. “We get you on someone else’s territory, and it gets chancier.”

“Well, I’ve no intention of spending the next four months and however many days being cooped up in this ship.”

“I’m aware of that,” Val snapped. “And I know we have to get you to a healer or a hospital or something.”

He nodded. “The portrait.”

Bizarrely, that weird unborn portrait Thor had been so hung up on was, she thought, one of the only reasons Loki was going to be able to drag himself in for any kind of exam. He wanted the child now, she believed him about that, but he seemed to want it with as little interference in his life as possible, like he considered he’d already done enough for it by getting hitched and heading off into space. Or they were back to the Jotun thing again, which she almost kept forgetting about—she missed his eyes, sometimes, but she was fond enough of the red. (And even fonder of his cunt.) If it was down to being stuck in a form he didn’t think too much of, she could see why he wouldn’t want to be poked and prodded. He still turned away from her half the time when they finished up in bed.

But the portrait of the babe intersected at some junction of pride and vanity, and Loki wanted it done as much as Thor did.

If seeing the child would make him happy, in a situation where fuck-all was a good time for him, then she’d bend things to make it happen. Her own inclinations included.

The portrait was Midgardian science, Thor had said, and what else did the Midgardians have? Stuff like pipes and cables and nets and electric letters. If she could find somewhere with about that level of tech, maybe they’d have what she was looking for.

She skimmed through the charts again and made the best call she could. “Okay. Perseus. Nice and safe and boring—biped mammals with a lot of alien traffic in and out, so they ought to have the experience.”

“Have you been there before?”

“Twice. I didn’t stay long. You heard the ‘boring’ part, right?” She glanced over her shoulder at him. He’d gotten one of those ice-spikes out almost the length of his arm now. “Why?”

“I’ve always imagined you were just on Sakaar all that while. Asgard, then Sakaar, then Asgard again.” He looked down at the nearly-invisible swell of the babe he was carrying, and his lip curled in something halfway between a smile and a smirk. “And now a little piece of Sakaar again.”

“I didn’t wash up at the arse-end of the universe right away. I bummed around a little first looking for the right place to—” Drink and forget and die, like she’d told Thor, but somehow, with everything between the two of them now feeling new and with the child in their future, she didn’t want to bring up the specter of all that all over again. “Crash-land.”

“I’d like to hear the tale of you sometime,” Loki said.

She laughed harshly. “There’s not much glory in it.”

“All the same.” He raised his foot, kicking the dagger to break it off his hand.

“You’re turning the floor all slippery.” She stood up. “I’ll go set the course.”

He waved his hand—insufferable prick—and she wound up stopping in the doorway, looking back at him.

He was natural to her, ridiculously—the mark she’d already thought about—but he was a choice, too. As accidental as his child and as deliberate as his keeping of it. And if her vow to Thor had stuck, and so had his, then she had the idea that they would stick to each other, too.

“Sometime,” Val said.

* * *

They put down on Perseus, and Loki’s bullshit above-it-all act gave up the ghost. His mouth went tight the moment they were off the ship, and it got tighter every time someone’s gaze so much as grazed him. A whole lot of colors on display here, but not a lot of blue. Though even if there’d been a shit-ton of it, Val didn’t know that it would have made a difference. Loki could have been on fucking Jotunheim itself and he’d still have been convinced somebody could pick him out as not belonging.

“It’s not that weird,” she said. “Plenty of men get knocked up. And plenty of people don’t look Aesir.”

“Thank you. Just hearing you say that’s made such a difference to me. I feel better already.”

Her mouth quirked. “I’ll go fuck myself, then.”

“Do.”

They advanced through the crowd, which parted for them—Val never had any problems with that. People made way for her.

Perseus was thickly settled, and they’d gone into one of the main hubs, so it was thronging with life and overheated with it; the air smelled of sweating bodies, both clean and unwashed, and strong perfumes: musky, citric, gingery. Val liked it. New Asgard was too damn clean for her tastes, just like Old Asgard had been, except for the Valkyrie fields. Everything was polished and scrubbed and everybody was considerate of the air scrubbers. It didn’t have this same liveliness to it.

She set their course for the hospital and breathed in, enjoying herself. It was good to feel the sun again. Princess Shuri had done her damnedest with the lamps on New Asgard, but it could never be exactly the same--

Suddenly Loki paled, his complexion going a morning-sky blue, and he reeled off to the side. Val followed close, Dragonfang in her hand before she knew she’d drawn it. The kind of fear she barely remembered sliced through her, white-hot.

“What is it? Is it the child? Are you hurt?”

“No,” he managed. He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth and then bent double, vomiting into the dust.

Oh. That.

“Thought you’d missed out on all the fun queasiness,” Val said. She tried to keep the relief out of her voice, since Loki probably didn’t think too highly of gagging up his breakfast off the side of an alien road.

He gagged again, the muscles in his throat spasming, and she tentatively settled her hand on his back. He reached around and grabbed it, his fingers digging tightly into hers. More from humiliation than pain, she thought, except she’d never seen him cling when he felt shamed—that was usually when the knives came out, so to speak. Sometimes literally. But now he was holding onto her, and for all she’d fucked up in her life, she was managing to hold on back.

He finally straightened up, wiping at his lips, and she saw that his eyes were closed. “That was unpleasant.”

“The smells?”  
  


He nodded. “This is making me weak.” And _there_ was the cutting she’d expected, turned savagely inward for the moment.

“It’s not doing anything to you it doesn’t do to anyone else,” Val said. “Carrying a child’s rough business.”

“I am unmanned—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“—and without my magic and my own _body_ , I’m growing more awkward by the day, and now I can’t even walk through an ordinary marketplace.”

And now he was making a scene in one, which couldn’t be good for them laying low. Val seized him by the chin and kissed his cheek hard, almost hard enough to bruise. “You’re fine,” she said fiercely, when she pulled back. “And I’ll keep you that way. And it’s not forever, but the child is, all right? Try and keep your eye on that, if you can.”

He exhaled, his now-sour breath warm against her face, and then he said, “I want a drink of water,” and gave her a look like she’d damn well better fetch it for him.

She could do that.

“Stay here,” she said.

He sat down on a flat rock, bracing his forehead with his hand. “Happily.”

She kicked some dirt over his sick until she judged it was buried enough for the smell not to set him off again.

Getting him a drink—Perseus sold its water it little glass bulbs—only took about a minute, given how thoroughly the marketplace was peppered with little convenience spots.

“My friend was sick over there,” she said, and the vendor immediately shoved a water bulb into her hands and made Val insist twice on paying for it.

It was only afterwards, turning back to him with the sweating bulb in her hand, that she realized she’d left him alone. Left him alone not two fucking seconds after she’d told him she would keep him safe.

She crossed the street in huge strides, bridging the distance between them as quickly as possible, and she pushed the water in his direction. He took it and swished a little around in his mouth, turning to spit, and then drank until it was empty.

He was fine. Nothing had happened. But she couldn’t afford to get careless like that.

The Grandmaster was lazy—he wouldn’t surveil them for the rest of their lives or anything like it, he’d lose interest faster than that, but he’d watch a while to get his chance, especially if it saved him the mess of a fight. And Val had just gift-wrapped an opportunity for him. Nice, crowded planet. Unattended, pregnant prince. Her husband. She looked at him turning the bulb around in little circles on his knee, watching the sunlight bounce off it.

 _My friend_ , she’d said to the vendor. It hadn’t been a cover, she just hadn’t been thinking. Clearly.

She threaded her fingers through his hair, and he looked up at her, a little surprised. Not like she was the cosseting type.

“Come on,” she said, her voice a bit rough. “Let’s go get your portrait done.”

They would have had to wait for a spot with the right doctor and the ultrasound artist, ordinarily, but even if they were trying to keep Loki’s name quiet, they were still using hers, and being a Valkyrie opened some doors even after all this time. So did large piles of credits, if she wanted to be more realistic. She preferred to think it was the intimidation factor, though. Nobody liked to flex a muscle for the first time in centuries only to find out it could no longer move anything.

Loki put up with the exam with the look of someone refusing to succumb to torture, and Val wondered how much of that was genuine and how much was just his propensity to blow everything up into grand drama. When he took her hand again, she had a better idea. She held him while he got himself prescriptions and recommendations and timelines.

“Are you having cravings?” the doctor said. She was a species Val didn’t have much familiarity with, something insectoid from some other world, and she had huge, reassuring amber eyes that blinked sideways. They were blinking a lot now in the long gap between her question and Loki’s answer.

“He’s—”

“Yes,” Loki said tersely. “But I haven’t sought fulfillment for any of them.”

“Why not?” the doctor said.

Val studied Loki. Yeah, she’d like to know the answer to that too.

“I can correct any nutritional imbalances via our usual meals,” Loki said, looking somewhere in the middle distance between Val and the doctor. “We’ve been traveling; it’s all a question of turning dials and programming the synthesizer anyway, it’s that kind of ship. I’m still getting what the child needs.”

“Well, now that you’re on Perseus, you can have some fresher foods and better options,” the doctor said. “Pregnancy doesn’t have to be joyless deprivation, you know. Your mood can help shape your body’s chemistry, so it does affect your child.” Her mouthparts chittered in what Val thought was probably a smile. “I’m sure it affects your wife.”

“We can get you some stuff,” Val said to him, and he turned his head, letting out a kind of sarcastic semi-huff.

“First times are hard,” the doctor said sympathetically. “But you’re doing very well.” She removed her gloves. “Now, you’d like a sonogram, correct?”

“One of the black-and-white portraits of the babe,” Loki said, refocusing. “Yes.”

“Ours come out closer to blue-and-white, but it’s the same idea.”

* * *

The machine painted the portrait in front of them, etching the moving shape in surges of electricity trapped behind glass.

“And there’s the heartbeat,” the other scarlet-coated, apparently-not-a-doctor person said. He looked a little like an especially willow Heimdall, stretched out to eight feet or so. For a second, even that faint resemblance had made her a little homesick, like there was a pit in her stomach. But then he had moved his rolling cube across Loki’s belly and she had forgotten everything but the picture forming before them.

So that was the heartbeat. Nice and strong.

“Do we take that screen with us?” Loki said, gesturing towards the glass.

“The monitor? Ah, no, no. We can print this off for you.”

“I would like another copy as well, for my brother.”

“Sure, no trouble at all. It’ll only take a moment. Until then—I’ll just leave the two of you here to look at your baby.” He stepped out.

They looked at the monitor-thing in silence. The image had been frozen in place since the cube had been taken off Loki’s stomach, and Val yearned to see that heartbeat again. She could see the spot where it would reverberate.

“It’s Aesir,” Loki said after a moment. “Or—whatever the Grandmaster is. But I prefer to think it’s Aesir.”

“I don’t know. Looks blue to me.”

She’d thought that might at least get an eyeroll out of him, but no luck. She wasn’t sure he’d heard her at all. “Jotun children don’t take that position in the womb. Even the smaller giants demand greater space.” He laid his hand lightly on his belly, where Val could still see some shininess from the gel they’d used to capture the portrait. “I can’t say I don’t prefer it this way, but I like to think—”

“You’d have loved it either way,” Val said.

“You sound very sure.”

“Indifference isn’t really your thing, is it?”

That got a hard little chuff of laughter. “No, but I excel at ambivalence.”

Maybe he was right, but she was tired of him thinking that the way he was was so damn fascinating that they ought to talk about it all the time; when you came right down to it, he was better than he feared and far more boring than he’d ever believe.

She was sure of herself, all the same, and after a while of looking at her, he seemed to know that—and, against all odds, to let the matter lie.

“Heimdall,” he said conversationally, “if you’re looking this way, tell Thor that the portrait hangs before me, and I’ve procured him a copy.” His eyes snapped to gold, bright as the apples of Idunn, and it was startling to see them in this version of his face.

Back in her day, it had been treason for the Guardian of the Bifrost to lend his gaze to anyone but the king himself, and somehow she didn’t think that ruling had changed. Heimdall _was_ a man who liked to have his own mind about things. She doubted Loki had ever thought about it one way or the other.

“I didn’t invite your attention so you could lecture me,” Loki was saying. “Yes. _Fine_. –Thank you.”

He turned red eyes back to her, looking unmistakably pleased.

“He says the child looks well, and he ought to know. He is the man who’s seen everything.”

Val felt a flush of pride almost despite herself, and then said, “What else was he—”

But then the man came back with their portraits, rolled up in tight tubes of translucent plastic, so she couldn’t finish asking the question until they were outside.

“What was the part you didn’t like hearing?” she said.

The sun beat down on them, and Loki’s lips parted like he was making a conscious effort to breathe through his mouth to keep from smelling all the baked-in scents of a crowded city. He said shortly, “He said I’m being a fool and I should go ahead, and whatever craving I was having, he was sure I’d satisfied worse in my time. He was also of the opinion that I ‘talk to you.’” He said the last few words like they were inherently ridiculous but looked at her sideways as he was doing it, like he wanted her to contradict him.

“You should talk to me,” Val said. “And it shouldn’t have to be that long a conversation, either. What do you want and why haven’t we already gotten it?”

He started off walking, moving like he was trying to outpace her. He could have done it, once, just because his legs were longer, but his balance was already subtly off. And maybe he wasn’t trying too hard.

“Snow,” he said after a moment.

Val shrugged. “We can get you snow.”

* * *

It was a long way from Perseus to the nearest world with a good icy climate, though. Val programmed the coordinates and let the ship spit a course out at her, along with an estimated arrival time three fucking weeks away.

Loki was due in about four months, and their frosty destination wasn’t the most habitable place in the galaxy. It was sparsely populated, and what people were there were nomadic and moved with the weather; they were good about seeing to their own, but they weren’t well-equipped for a visitor to drop in with a heavy belly. Val thought they could swing a long stay there, though, as long as Loki went on feeling all right. Jotun pregnancies were supposed to be hardy.

“There’s a higher-tech planet here.” She pointed it out for him. “Their healers are pricy, but we’ve got the credits, and we don’t, I’ve got a big sword. We can spend your last couple weeks there, pre-delivery, if that sounds okay.”

“Send Thor the charts for it. Though he may not be able to make it in time.” He looked around like he could see all of space laid out on all sides of him instead of just the ship’s walls. “We are in the middle of nowhere.”

“He’ll get here.” That was another thing where she knew she was right, no matter how little sense it made. She tapped out the message and then sat back in her chair. “You’re rounder.”

He glared at her. “I’d noticed.”

Rounder and constantly having to piss. And nearly as constantly wanting to fuck, not that she was complaining about that. She could get wet just thinking about hooking his thighs up against her ears and eating out his cunt, or riding his cock while she brushed up against the swell of him that had started to make all those positions both difficult and delicious all at once.

But this wasn’t about bed, and it wasn’t even about her enjoying rankling him, either. She said, a little hopefully, “So I thought you could probably feel the babe stirring around by now.”

His face tightened. She didn’t know how that could have offended him—

“No,” he said. His voice was strained. “No, I can’t. What I read was—inconclusive. First pregnancies often don’t quicken early.”

“I just thought since you were getting in your last few months—”

“I grasp the concept. It’s just not happening.” His fingers had gone pale where he was gripping the arm of his chair.

“Oh,” Val said softly. “Well, they said on Perseus that everything looked normal.”

“For a man with two bodies carrying a child from only _one_ of those lineages, conceived via a lunatic.”

“For all that, yeah.” She slid her foot forward until her boot was touching his. “Everybody wants to kick you sooner or later, your highness. I don’t see why the kid ought to be any different.”

He pressed his foot against hers more firmly and gave her a slightly weary smile. “That _is_ more or less how you and I got to know each other. And look, that turned out to be a beautiful love story.”

He didn’t say it quite as dryly as he would have a few months ago, if he even would have said it back then at all.

Val thought she’d heard worse love stories. Probably.

If she ever did tell him her whole life story, this would be one of the better parts of it.

* * *

Their ice planet was called Silek, and the ship had warned them eighteen times that they were going to land there in the middle of one of the worst snowstorms their chosen hemisphere had ever known. They finally had to turn the damn sensor off. There was nothing there, nothing but glass-smooth planes of ice and thick rumpled blankets of snow. There was barely even a breeze to stir anything up.

“Yeah. This is fearsome.”

“Can we disembark?” The urgency in his voice was plain, though she’d have known it was there even if he’d bothered to hide it: he’d been eating ice chips by the handful for the last few days, like his body had hit the limit on how long it could go with that snow-craving unsatisfied.

“Don’t see why not,” Val said breezily. She did see why not, though. It was too damn quiet and too undisturbed—not just no storm but no wind, no footprints, and no noise. She was going out there with Dragonfang in one hand, that was for sure.

But she was still going out there, and so was he. He’d hit some kind of limit for how long he could stand to be inside the ship without going crazier than usual, and he needed what they’d come here to get. He was Jotun as well as Aesir, even if he didn’t like it, and he clearly needed a dose of cold.

She headed out with him, staying close to his side in case he lost his balance.

He looked down at the untouched white snow just past his feet, and Val could almost see him calculating how he’d bend down to get it with that belly in the way. Crouch, probably.

She was ready to scoop some up for him herself, but then he extended one hand. A delicate tracery of ice branched off his fingers and reached down to the ground, and the snow itself rose up to meet him, flowing in a kind of windblown pileup and falling into the cup of his palm as he turned his hand around. The smile on his face was one of such pure satisfaction that Val wanted to grab him by the ears and kiss him hard.

“Not bad,” she said.

He flexed his fingers, breaking off the icicle lattice. The smile stayed. “No, it wasn’t, was it?” He ate the handful of snow, and some tension he’d been carrying around for weeks eased.

Idiot. They could have gotten here all the sooner if he hadn’t been so fucking stubborn about everything. She fetched him up some more, heaping handfuls of it, and said, “We used to put honey and sugar syrup in it sometimes, when I was growing up.”

“You had snow?”

She wasn’t sure what response she’d expected, but it hadn’t been that. “Of course we had snow. You didn’t?”

“Only in the mountains. And I thought the Valkyrie were all based in the heart of Asgard, close to the throne.”

“We were, but we still had _weather_.”

“Odin liked warmer climes as he got older,” Loki said.

“Anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered. I did grow up in the mountains, so I’d have had snow no matter what mood Odin was in.”

Loki looked at her. “I didn’t know that.”

She barely knew it herself, anymore. She hardly ever thought about those years, so few in the grand scheme of things. She hadn’t felt young for a very long time now. But she wouldn’t have minded raising their child in the mountains.

“Lots of us came out of the high places,” she said. “If you grew up with thinner air, when you came down into the valleys and the lower cities, all that oxygen around made you think you could do anything. It was like I could get drunk off breathing. I couldn’t get enough of running—it seemed like I could go forever before I got exhausted, and I could always go farther than someone who’d grown up in the flatlands.”

She retrieved another snowball for him.

“I understand there are mountains on Midgard,” Loki said. “We could—”

Val saw the shimmer in the air. She twisted in front of Loki and took the stunner blow to the back of her armor. Pain arced across her shoulders and the small of her back, but there wasn’t any paralysis—Valkyrie armor was girded, above all else, against anything that would stop you moving.

Loki grabbed her shoulder and pulled her close to him, creating a wall of ice around them. Despite the chill, he was sweating from the effort—he’d gotten pretty damn good at Jotun magic, considering how little time he’d had to learn it, but it was still taking it out of him.

And it didn’t matter too much anyway. The ice wall was impressive, but it was no match for a melt-stick.

The Grandmaster. And Topaz.

Val stayed in front of Loki, Dragonfang drawn and at her side.

“Well,” the Grandmaster said, after he’d melted a hole through Loki’s ice shield. (Loki muttered something under his breath and sent it rocketing back down to earth; if Val had had time, she would have thanked him for remembering they didn’t want to fight up against a bloody wall.) “I thought I felt a little something. You’d be surprised how _rare_ it is for someone like me to actually wind up reproducing. Practically an endangered species, you know? You weren’t blue the last time I saw you, were you? It’s awkward, but I really can’t remember.”

“No,” Loki said. “I wasn’t blue.”

“Okay, good. I’d hate to have forgotten a pretty face. Anyway, you have the child, I want the child—you see where this is going.”

“It’s not quite a child yet,” Val said.

The Grandmaster grinned at her, happy as a child. “It was rude of me not to say hello! Scrapper 412, honestly, I’m so _proud_ that you’ve—”

“Crawled back into the sewer you came from,” Topaz said.

“I was going to say something more like, ‘reinvented yourself’ or ‘reconnected with your roots,’ or, for that matter, landed someone I know is quite the vixen between the sheets.” He turned to Topaz. “Are you ever going to not hate her?”

“No,” Topaz said.

“These petty little arguments—I tell you, I just don’t understand them. Anyway, yes, the bun in the oven is, admittedly, not fully baked yet, but it’s close enough. It’s gotten to the point where it can survive a little fresh air.”

“You can’t know that,” Loki said.

“Actually, I can.” The Grandmaster’s eyes were a little harder then, a little shimmery. “Knowing things is one of my specialties, not that I don’t have a lot of them. Keeping this storm away so you two could land, for another.”

Shit. She should have guessed that.

“Grandmaster,” Val said. She hoped some of the warmth in his voice when he’d spoken to her was genuine—unbalanced and chancy, as usual, but genuine. “You probably know I married him, then, don’t you? I was hoping to start a family.”

“That’s a mistake,” Topaz said.

“That’s _sweet_ ,” the Grandmaster said. “But, and I hate to bring this up, you did sort of abscond with my Champion and my prisoner and, as it turns out, the hot little number carrying my child, so I’m not really _inclined_ to, ah, what am I trying to say here—care. Not to be harsh. Your culture’s into the whole glorious death idea anyway, though, right? So if you really push this, and you wind up dying to defend your husband or prince or whatever—”

“Both,” Val said.

“—then, hey, you can waltz off into some glowy victorious afterlife, if that’s what you believe in. Does that sound good to everybody?”

Loki said, “Not quite to me.”

“You’ll survive,” Topaz said, her gaze flickering over to him. “Getting the whelp out of you isn’t a problem.”

“Yes.” She could feel his breath stirring her hair, they were standing so close. “But I’ve grown rather attached to it. And to her.”

“This is taking so much longer than I thought it would. Topaz, would you mind—” The Grandmaster made a vague hand-wave. “Accelerating things?”

“Kill her, grab him?”

“Yeah, that’s the general concept. The words just sound so _harsh_ , though.”

Topaz was his muscle. He wouldn’t exert himself to do all the grubby physical stuff without her—he wouldn’t snatch Loki while Val and Topaz were locked in combat. She hoped Loki knew that, because there was no time for her to say it. Once Topaz got told to do what she’d been longing to do for years, she didn’t wait around to get started.

She swung into motion. She’d spent too long cooped up on the ship with nothing but exercises to warm her muscles and without even Loki to spar with, as of late, and there was a moment of feeling sickeningly out-of-tune with her own body. Shit, he’d been the one to get pregnant and she’d _still_ wound up getting compromised—but then everything fell into line. It had to. She was fighting for him and for his child, their child, and she’d cut her own throat to drown Topaz in her blood before she’d give up on them.

Topaz, having apparently found that her gun hadn’t done much, was working with a sword instead, its edges bright with shock-light that did nothing to Valkyrie armor but was hard on her sword; she could almost hear the metal weakening as they hammered away at each other. They hadn’t had this kind of shit when Asgard’s armory had been its peak. Dragonfang had lasted thousands of years, and now it could break under fucking Topaz’s fucking laser sword—

But she couldn’t afford to think about it. If it broke or dulled, then she’d deal with it when it did.

Until then, lacking a shield, speed was her big resource. Speed and agility, because Topaz had always been more of a straight-out brawler.

Val danced circles around her, cutting in wherever she could. Topaz wasn’t an ordinary, run-of-the-mill fighter—she was stronger and more resilient than almost anyone Val had gone head-to-head with—but she wasn’t a Valkyrie and she wasn’t Hela. Val was born for this. She’d been honed for it. She would not—

And then, just as she cut a long slash across Topaz’s thigh, her foot slipped on the ice.

That was all it would take. A badly timed fall.

Even as she rolled to take her feet again, she could hear Topaz’s sword swinging towards her, vibrating in the thin winter air.

The world around them exploded.

Ice crystals flew everywhere. Snow sprayed up, whiting out her vision.

Whiting out Topaz’s, too. Val jerked to the side, and the blade zinged by her. She flung herself upright.

“Loki!”

The snow dissipated instantly, flattening out, and she caught a glimpse of him there, upright and unhurt but rigid with exhaustion.

He’d made a shield for her when she’d needed one.

Not a bad team.

She stabbed forward, with Topaz barely knocking her blow aside. She felt like a berserker now, with the taste of blood in her mouth and the hard snow squeaking beneath her boots. She could see the fear on Topaz’s face as she pressed close, unleashing a flurry of cuts that Topaz parried, parried, parried, and then missed. The wound steamed in the cold. Val smiled, and turned—

\--and was suddenly stopped, as though she’d been caught in crystal.

Topaz was frozen too. Even the drops of blood working their way down her armor had stopped their crawling progress.

The Grandmaster clucked his tongue. “These custody disputes, they really get ugly, don’t they?”

“You should have seen mine,” Loki said. “Let her go.”

“Or you’ll do your little snow-globe trick again? That was technically cheating, you know.”

Val could talk, at least. “No more than you making sure we’d land right where you wanted us.”

“That one I’ll give you. But you know I can’t really let you _kill_ Topaz, right, Scrapper 142? I mean, she’s been with me forever—at this point, if I got a new right hand, I’d have to do all this training, and …”

“It’d be a drag,” Val said.

“That exactly. Of course, I could just keep you frozen like this and unfreeze her—” He wriggled his fingers, thinking about it, and Val heard Loki saying something heatedly behind her, something about all the fury of Asgard, and then the Grandmaster pinched his fingers together and Loki’s voice dropped out of the conversation. The Grandmaster had eyes only for her, and his gaze was cool and level now. “But that wouldn’t really be in the spirit of the game, would it?”

She kept her voice steady. “No.”

“So you really did marry him,” the Grandmaster said thoughtfully. “I never thought I’d see the day when you got hitched.” He put his hand to his chin. “The child doesn’t take after me.”

“No.”

“Doesn’t seem to take after him, either, at least not the current him. Family trees, wow, they’ll surprise you.” He smiled. “Let’s say I’m not too interested in babies, cribs, the feedings, the diapers, all that. Let’s even say I’m not too interested in the two of you, though I’ll always wish you the best, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart. I still wouldn’t rush to the conclusion, right here and now, that if this kid grows up … more interesting than number one dad over there, that I wouldn’t get, well, interested. I am kind of a rarity in the universe, and it’s not like I can go impregnate my brother, we’re not that close. So on the off-chance that all that happens, that Loki Junior winds up being just fascinating—it might be worth the hassle to go round two with you. Might even be worth the blow to my ego it would take to cheat.”

The sun off his teeth was almost blinding.

“Just thought we should all know where we stand,” he said.

The air around her loosened, and she could move again. Topaz gave her a look that wanted to flay her down to her bones and hobbled back, clutching her wounded side.

Something seemed to fill up Val’s head, like wads of cotton, and the next thing she knew, Topaz and the Grandmaster were gone and she was sitting on the ground with Loki, snow soaking through her breeches. He raised his head and blinked at her, a little dazed. She kissed him.

“Yeah,” she said. “Used to be that was the only way he’d leave a room. It’s pure Hel when you have a hangover.”

“When _don’t_ you have a hangover,” Loki said under his breath.

Lately, actually.

He scooped up some more snow and ate it, his lips against his trembling fingers.

“Thanks for the ice-trick,” Val said. Her arse was freezing, but she didn’t want to get up quite yet. The damage had already been done anyway. She reached out and took his hand and put his fingers in her mouth, sucking the cold off them.

“You could have died.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, although she did. “I’m pretty damn good at living.”

He let out an exasperated breath between his teeth. “Apparently.”

“If he ever comes after the child, we can lead him away from Asgard again. And you’ll have your magic back, and me and Thor both behind you.” She felt something flit around her ears, a warmer breeze from another world, tickling her hair against the back of her neck. “And Heimdall, if I’m reading the wind right.”

There was at least a half-smile on his face and a purplish flush in his cheeks. He said, “You’ve been the one staring at our star charts all the time. If we left here now, could we get home in time for the birth?”

“Sure,” she said, startled but not too surprised. “With a couple of weeks to spare, even.”

Loki said quietly, “Then I think I’d like that.”

“There’s snow down on Earth,” Val offered. “I could bring you up some.” She shifted against him, wrapping one arm around his shoulders and resting her other hand on his belly, and then they both felt it: the small thrash and kick of the babe inside greeting them.

Snow. Yeah, he could have all the fucking snow he wanted, all the snow the child wanted. She laughed, and then he laughed too—and followed it up with a wince as the child dealt out an especially vicious blow.

“I think I’ve been a bad influence already,” she said.

“Obviously.” He cast a critical gaze around the drifts of snow. “The storm he held back will come in soon. But we should freeze some of this and take it with us, for the journey home.”

Val nodded. She stood up.

Loki raised one hand. “You’ll have to help me up.”

She did, and when she looked down afterwards, she saw that he’d used his last scraping of magic to make another one of those ice-branchings up her sleeve. It was like ivy, with a clumsy icy rosette close to her knuckles; it was like a favor to wear into battle. It stayed even when she flexed her fingers to keep on holding his hand.


End file.
